[jyl]

Mac heads, want to give me your opinion on this?

Getting a refurb MacBook Pro 15" for my daughter. She is a junior in college, working on dual degrees in journalism and digital art. Her laptop is a MacBook Air that she's had since high school. It is perfectly fine for journalism but with only 4 GB RAM it is proving too wimpy for the digital art stuff. She has a 12.9" iPad Pro that she uses as her main carry-around computer and drawing tablet; she'd it as a second display and drawing tablet for the MBP.

So the choices are:

A. Refurbished 15.4-inch MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel i7 with Retina Display
Originally released May 2015
15.4-inch (diagonal) Retina display; 2880-by-1800 resolution at 220 pixels per inch
16GB of 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory
256GB PCIe-based flash storage
720p FaceTime HD Camera
Intel Iris Pro Graphics

B. Refurbished 15.4-inch Macbook Pro 2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 with Retina display - Space Gray
Originally released October 2016
Touch Bar with integrated Touch ID sensor
15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display; 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch
16GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory
256GB PCIe-based onboard SSD1
720p FaceTime HD Camera
Radeon Pro 450 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory

What do you think? Daughter leans toward A because she doesn't want to buy and carry around adapters. B is a little thinner/lighter, and somewhat more performant but I don't know how much she'd notice the performance differences, since she's doing Photoshop etc rather than lots of video rendering. I am a little worried about the new keyboard's durability. The price difference is only about $300.